Five important website statistics you must monitor to deliver business growth

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Five important website statistics you must monitor to deliver business growth

A website today is vital to any business in a way it has never been in the past. Whether individuals are using it for entertainment, education or shopping, the number of daily users of the internet is surely exceeding a billion.

Despite astonishing numbers like this being thrown around, you might be unaware how this is benefiting or deterring your website. Whilst possessing a website is a great start to prospering online, monitoring some key statistics can tell you how well your website is performing and help you to decide where to focus your marketing for progressive business growth.

How?

You’re now hopefully determined and inspired to begin tracking crucial statistics but you might already have hit a roadblock. Do you know how to find out these statistics?

The tool used most often is Google Analytics which houses a vast library of statistics you wouldn’t even dream of being available to you whether that’s the age of your website users or their mobile phone manufacturer. This bank of statistics available is the perfect way of tracking key statistics relating to your website.

Not only does it have such a significant amount of data available, it’s also free for you to use and simple to set up. Also, with a simple outlay, anybody with basic knowledge of the internet and math can use it.

The five important statistics

Now you know how to track key statistics, we’re going to tell you what to track.

Traffic

You have your beautiful website which can be found by those billion daily users we mentioned but how many of those billion are visiting your website?

Taking prominence on the Google Analytics home page, it’s easy to immediately see how much traffic you’re getting to your website in terms of users and sessions. Users means an individual whereas sessions are how many times your website has been visited. This means that if you have one user and 5 sessions, that one person has visited your website 5 times.

Another traffic statistic you should certainly explore is where the traffic is coming from. This is known as ‘Traffic Channel’. This tells you whether somebody has found your website through an organic search (e.g. Google search), directly (typed your web address into a web browser) or via a referral (a link on another website, perhaps social media).

It’s important to check traffic for numerous reasons. Not only is it interesting to know how many people use your website but traffic is also relevant when considering many of the other statistics we’re going to discuss. Analysing traffic channel is important as if you’re doing work in a specific place (e.g. Facebook), you can see whether this is working for your business or not as well as boost your efforts in places you’re getting plenty of traffic from.

Bounce Rate

Whilst you now know how many people visit your website and how many times they’ve visited, are people exploring your website or just leaving straight away? This is what the bounce rate statistic tells you.

Conspicuously displayed on the Google Analytics website, your bounce rate is displayed as a percentage. The lower your bounce rate, the better. If you have a high bounce rate, for example, 90%, this means that 90 percent of people start a session (visit your website) and then leave without exploring other pages on your website.

It’s important that you track this because this number can tell you if something is going wrong. If individuals are coming to your home page and then leaving instantly, it could mean something is wrong. Maybe your home page is riddled with grammatical errors or it isn’t clear what the user is meant to do next. This can help you to diagnose issues and fix them so it doesn’t affect future web sessions on your website and halt your business growth.

Pages visited

Now you know the percentage of people who visit your website and how many stay, it’s time to find out where the user goes on your website.

Noticeable on Google Analytics due to the apt heading ‘what pages do your users visit?’, you can see where users are going on your website. For example, if you have a blog post based on a certain product, it will tell you how many people have looked at this. It will tell you this for every single page on your website whether that’s the home page or the about us page.

It’s imperative to track this statistic as it can help you decide whether your website is efficient in getting users to perform the action that you want them to. For example, if you want them to read your blog posts and your blog posts are the most visited pages, your achieving what you’re aiming for. If it isn’t what you want to see, assess what you’re doing to see how you can further encourage people to perform the action you want. If users are visiting the wrong pages, you can make changes to direct them to the pages you’d prefer them to visit.

Retaining Users

You know how many people visit, you know how many stay and you know how many pages they visit. Next, you’re going to find out whether you retain your users.

Aptly named, ‘how well do you retain users?’ will show you how many people are returning to your website. For example, if your website is visited by 100 users one week, this will tell you how many of them are returning in the form of a statistic. If you had 100 visitors last week and your retained is 90%, this means that 90 out of the 100 have come back to your website.

Tracking this statistic is important to your business because it’s always going to be vital that you have people returning to your website. If a user only visits your website one time, they’re not going to be a long-term prospect for your website. If somebody visits multiple times, this means they will potentially convert (buy or whatever a conversion is to you) time and time again. Used together with the traffic channel statistic, you can target specific groups of users based on where they visited from to encourage them to return.

Session Duration

Now you’re aware of a host of statistics that are crucial to your business and website, this is the last statistic that we’d advise you to keep an eye on.

Easily found at the top of your Google Analytics home page, session duration is how long somebody stays on your website on average. If this is a number that’s minutes, this is usually a good thing. If it’s only a few seconds, that’s when you have to worry. The longer, the better with this statistic.

Watching this statistic is necessary as it tells you how long a user stays on your website. If this number is seconds instead of minutes, it might indicate a problem for you. Maybe a user cannot find what they’re looking for or there’s errors on the pages their visiting. This can help you to locate technical errors as well as help you modify your website to make it more accessible.

We are a web design agency based in Batley, West Yorkshire and have been developing, designing and delivering great looking websites for over ten years now.

We specialise in e-commerce, content management systems and all in one Business Solutions and our search engine optimisation services have a proven track record in achieving high search engine rankings for our clients.